Hm, would that be permitted by the order? (At the very least, they'd have to preserve all the content he's already generated, but I could see Trump arguing that a platform that kicks him off "removes or restricts access to content" that he'd like to post but can't.)
Basically, if content companies become liable for the content their users post, they will have to become much more heavy handed in what they remove. Trump has benefited more than anyone from how little social media companies actually police content.
Seems counter productive to the President's intent. If platforms can be held liable for user posts, that will give them a strong incentive to remove anything at all that might even come close to giving them legal liability. So sure, maybe changing the law (or asking the FCC to reinterpret its strictures) would "get back" at the companies President Trump thinks are doing something wrong to him, but the net results would be severe limitations on what he could say on all platforms.
It would have to happen through the courts, and the courts won't allow it.
They can bully Twitter and threaten to e.g. withhold federal contracts (though even this runs into legal trouble) but how does the executive branch just "shut down" a platform?
You can't just send in the FBI and put a halt on things.
This will just be more of his mindless rage that a certain portion of the population gobbles up. His real goal is to discredit Twitter et al, which is unlikely to have much impact.
Unless Trump is challenging the terms of service that he had to agree to when getting his account, this is largely a non-issue. Trump _agreed_ that Facebook/Twitter could ban him whenever he crossed their usage policy, which they can alter at any time.
Essentially, Trump agreed that they had the right to ban him before he posted anything to their services.
So sure, the government may be able to force people to host things they don't want to, but I don't think the government will force anybody to break a contract that both parties agreed to in this case.
I'm not a republican, nor a Trump supporter, but I disagree. I think the courts would be able to create a body of case law over whether a removal was due to a post being "violent, obscene or harassing" or for some other reason.
We can't be terrified of regulating platforms that have massive amounts of control over what most people see or hear about.
Ending section 230 would end every website that has user uploaded content. Nothing will come of this. The biggest risk to twitter is that Trump gets mad and deletes his account.
Honestly, I'm more interested in what kind of precedent this will set. I mean, a social platform censoring the president, and more so, banning it.
We're living in interesting times.
I’m curious how that would turn out? What would happen if Trump was banned? While I’m against censorship, banning someone for not following your “code of conduct” is well within your rights.
That's an interesting point about @POTUS. I wonder if they would still let him use it, and if he had already been using it if they would have blocked that, too.
In the part where it was declared a de facto public forum for interacting with the POTUS. It is implied that Twitter would face consequences for violating the rights of the population to redress grievances directly with their elected leader in the forum, in this case, it being a Twitter account. The US National Archives also weighed in and said they would sanction Twitter if the account is removed before the end of his Presidency.
I checked, and even after the Twitter ban, President Trump can still post on the White House web site and on his own Trump brand web sites. He just can't use Twitter, Facebook, etc. right now.
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